When the French government saw the potential value of the fur trade, the fishing industry, and other resources of northern North America, it began to take more interest in the region, which came to be known as New France. New France would eventually comprise Canada (the area drained by the St. Lawrence), Acadia (now the Maritime provinces), the island of Newfoundland (shared unwillingly with the English), and later Louisiana (the valley of the Mississippi River). France claimed and defended this vast area as its possession. For the most part, however, indigenous inhabitants continued their way of life unaffected by French laws or customs, and they dealt with the French primarily as allies and as customers for their furs. The French claim was contested by the English, who tried persistently to divert the fur trade or to occupy parts of the territory.

1. Early Years

To confirm its claims to North American territory, France needed to build permanent forts and settlements. But settlements were expensive, and in order to pay for them, commercial colonizers sought a monopoly on the fur trade. Pierre du Gua, sieur de Monts, acquired such a monopoly from the king of France, and in 1604 he established a post in Acadia. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain, an explorer hired by de Monts, founded a settlement at Québec on the St. Lawrence River. Champlain, who became the champion of French colonization, understood that a monopoly of the inland fur trade could be better protected there, where the river narrowed, rather than at sites on the open coast of Acadia. Consequently, French colonization began to focus on the St. Lawrence valley. Eventually, Champlain convinced Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, of the importance of North America. In 1627 Richelieu organized the Company of One Hundred Associates to develop and administer New France.

To maintain his settlement and develop the fur trade on the St. Lawrence, Champlain had to form alliances with the local Algonquian nations and their inland allies, the Huron confederacy. These indigenous allies brought the furs to Québec, and with their assistance Champlain was able to travel widely and to map eastern North America from Newfoundland to the Great Lakes.

Under the company, the Canada colony continued to grow after Champlain died at Québec in 1635. More settlements were founded, notably at Trois-Rivières (1634) and Montréal (1642). However, the colony remained small in population and dependent on the fur trade. Fur traders also maintained a small French presence in Acadia, and in the 1640s a small, settled Acadian community took root around Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) on the Bay of Fundy.

In the 1640s New France was unable to aid its ally, the Huron confederacy, in a war with the Iroquois. After the Iroquois defeated and scattered the Huron in 1649, New France's fur trade was devastated, and Montréal and Québec were exposed to attack. The colony survived, however, and the fur trade rebounded after the Ottawa, Ojibwa, and other Algonquian nations replaced the Huron as French allies and suppliers. New France's trader-explorers also began to venture inland from Montréal in search of new sources of furs. Two of them, Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre Esprit Radisson, explored the west side of Lake Superior in the 1650s.

2. Development of the Colony

In 1663, when New France still had barely 3,000 people, Louis XIV's finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert abolished the One Hundred Associates, ending the era of company rule. Thenceforth, New France was a royal province ruled from Québec by a governor-general, who commanded the military forces and symbolized royal authority. In addition, an intendant oversaw colonial finances, justice, and daily administration. Both officials reported to the Minister of Marine in the king's court, since all French colonies were administered by the naval department. An appointed Superior Council advised the governor and acted as a supreme court, but there were no elective bodies in the government of New France.

With royal support, the defenses of New France were improved. The Carignan-Salières regiment, a veteran military force of 1,200, arrived in 1665 and waged a campaign against the Iroquois. This campaign led to a peace settlement with the Iroquois. About 400 members of the Carignan-Salières regiment stayed on in Canada as settlers. During the first decade of royal rule, the monarchy also subsidized immigration from France, notably of some 700 unmarried women, who were later called filles du roi (daughters of the king) because the king paid for their transportation and dowries. Their arrival helped balance the male-female ratio, which had been overwhelmingly male. Thereafter immigration from France was slight; the 10,000 settlers reported on the 1681 census became, by natural increase, the ancestors of almost all the 6.3 million French-speaking Canadians of the late 20th century.

Soon after the peace settlement with the Iroquois, New France acquired a permanent garrison of colonial troops. Soldiers for the colony came from France, but they were commanded by what became a hereditary aristocracy in New France. Military officers explored new territory, built forts, and participated in diplomacy, trade, and warfare with the indigenous peoples.

3. Trade and Exploration

In 1664 Colbert organized a new company, the Company of the West Indies, to hold the fur trade monopoly. As a settled rural population developed in the St. Lawrence River valley, the fur trade moved westward and northward. After 1670 there was a new competitor in the fur trade. In that year, King Charles II of England granted a trade monopoly in the area of Hudson Bay to a London group, the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). However, the fur trade merchants of Montréal were able to compete successfully. They combined the fur trade with exploration and missionary work. Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette began exploring the Mississippi River, and René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, reached the Gulf of Mexico in 1682.

Illicit traders called coureurs de bois(woods rangers) and licensed ones called voyageurs pushed northwest toward the prairies. Some remained there, adopting indigenous ways of life and marrying indigenous women. Around 1700, King Louis XIV authorized development of a chain of forts linking the St. Lawrence to Louisiana, a colony newly founded at the mouth of the Mississippi. Some fur traders and their mixed-blood families formed communities of farmers and traders around these forts and posts. Their descendents became the Métis (French for “mixed people”).

4. French Colonial Society

a. Religion

The Roman Catholic Church was a powerful element in colonial society. Although France had many Protestants at the time, its official religion was Roman Catholicism, and this was the form of Christianity that France desired to spread in North America. Thus Protestants were prohibited from settling in New France, and Roman Catholic religious organizations were charged with maintaining and spreading the Catholic faith. The first religious organization to send missionaries to New France was the Franciscan Récollet group, who arrived in 1615. In 1633 they were replaced by the richer, better-organized Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. As the church gradually reoriented itself to serving the settler community, members of the Ursulines, an organization of nuns (women devoted to the religious life) came in 1639 to start schools for girls. Sulpician priests, who ran seminaries to educate future priests, arrived in 1657.

Bishop François de Laval, who had led the colonial church since 1659, established the Diocese of Québec in 1674. It was supported by mandatory tithes, which took the form of taxes levied on the farmers' produce. Religious bodies ran hospitals and schools and often owned large estates called seigneuries. New France, however, was never abundantly supplied with clergy. Though the people were overwhelmingly Catholic, rural communities might see a priest only a few times a year.

b. Land Tenure

New France developed as a largely rural society, as farmers cleared land along the St. Lawrence and adjacent rivers. These farmers, called habitants, held their land under the seignorial system. Land in New France was granted in the form of seigneuries to large landlords, or seigneurs, who in turn granted acreages to farming families. In return the farmers had to pay annual dues to the seigneur in the form of produce, labor, or sometimes money. New France's farm families lacked export markets—they were hundreds of miles from the ocean—and so they produced mainly for themselves rather than for sale. The members of large farm families worked together to raise wheat, vegetables, and livestock. As younger family members grew up and married, they cleared new land. The farmers had little opportunity for formal education, but they lived better than did most peasants in France at the time.

Seigneurial lands usually brought little income to their owners, and owning seigneuries did not confer noble status. However, land ownership was another sign of prestige for the colonial elite. Few seigneurs lived on their estates or gave them close attention. Most seigneurs lived in the towns, and many had careers as military officers.

5. French and British Rivalry

a. Territorial Disputes

In the 1680s New France was again at war with the Iroquois, partly over control of the fur trade but also as an offshoot of war between France and England. The English and their Iroquois allies attacked the settlements on the St. Lawrence in King William's War (1689-1697), but New France now had a permanent garrison and could strike back. New France's soldiers, notably Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, raided the frontiers of New York and New England with their indigenous allies and seized most of the English trading posts on Hudson Bay. After almost a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) merely confirmed each country's possessions before the war, even returning Acadia, which the English had captured, to the French. In 1701 the Iroquois made a comprehensive peace with New France and sought to remain neutral in future conflicts between the two countries.

In 1702 a new war, Queen Anne's War, broke out between France and Great Britain (a new union of three countries headed by England). By the Peace of Utrecht that ended the war, France was compelled to yield its land in Newfoundland, although it kept seasonal fishing rights on the north side (the French Shore), and its claims to Hudson Bay. The Acadian mainland was also ceded to Britain. However, the French kept their forts and trading posts on the north side of the Bay of Fundy, maintaining that this was Mi'kmaq land that had never become part of Acadia. The Acadians who lived under British rule became the neutral French, tied to neither the French nor the British, but always distrusted by the British. They and the Mi'kmaq were the only people living in the colony, which the British called Nova Scotia, until the seaport of Halifax was founded in 1749.

France kept Cape Breton Island and Île Saint Jean (now Prince Edward Island), organizing them as the colony of Isle Royale. After 1713 the French fishing industry focused on Cape Breton Island, where the fortified town of Louisbourg was founded that year. Louisbourg soon became a successful fishing and trading port as well as a military base. In the peaceful decades that followed, New France continued to grow and prosper, from 18,000 people in 1713 to 40,000 in 1737 and 55,000 in 1755. Most of these people lived in the long-established farming communities of the St. Lawrence valley, the heartland of New France.

b. The Fur Trade

Fur trade forts dotted the continent, and Montréal's merchants continued to control the lion's share of the fur trade, which grew and spread westward. The French approached the fur trade differently than the HBC. The French went into the back country to collect furs, but the HBC generally preferred to establish posts at shipping ports and let the indigenous trappers bring their furs to the posts. Although the HBC made a generous profit, its trade was often intercepted upstream by Montréalers who met the trappers on their home ground and bought the best of their furs.

The French fur trade operations were extended far to the west by military officer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, and his sons. They explored almost to the Rocky Mountains in the 1730s and 1740s and established a string of fur trading forts. The fur traders who followed them established routes along the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. The French forged alliances, based on the trade, with the indigenous peoples of the west, and this meant that French soldiers, traders, and missionaries could move with relative ease across the continent. But since the indigenous nations trapped and traded the pelts and European hatters processed them, the fur trade never provided work for more than a few hundred French colonists.

c. The French and Indian War

With the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Britain began a relentless attack on France's colonies. The conflict began in the Ohio Valley, where traders from the 13 colonies were beginning to settle. This British expansion threatened Louisiana's links with the rest of New France. The British also threatened the French on the Atlantic coast. In 1755 Britain rounded up and deported some 7,000 Acadians, destroying the century-old Acadian society of Nova Scotia. The Acadians were replaced by settlers from New England, who occupied the productive diked farmlands that the Acadians had created by the Bay of Fundy. Some of the deported Acadians were sent to France, and some eventually went to Louisiana, where their present-day descendants are known as Cajuns. Some retreated to the woods to avoid being sent away and settled farther north on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After 1764 the British allowed some deportees to return, and in the last part of the 18th century a few came back to join the refugees in these new settlements.

For several years New France's forces, led by the experienced French general the Marquis of Montcalm, held their own against the large and very costly assault by British forces. In a global military contest, Britain was compelled to devote one-seventh of its army—20,000 soldiers—to face down a few thousand French troops, supported by militia and indigenous allies, in North America. But Louisbourg fell in 1758, and its population was deported to France. In 1759 three British armies pushed toward the St. Lawrence heartland. After a summer-long siege of Québec, the young British general James Wolfe won the battle of the Plains of Abraham and captured the city. Montréal fell the following summer and New France came under British rule.

The conquest did not end all the fighting. The final stage was a widespread indigenous campaign in the spring of 1763, under Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa, against the western posts where British garrisons had recently replaced the French. Most of these posts were in the southern and western territories of Canada that now form the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The indigenous nations of the area resented the 13 colonies' westward expansion onto their lands, and joined the uprising to force them back. However, they were unable to sustain their attack or to sever British supply lines.

from: "Canada" Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.